Cut Down In A Sanguinary Ambuscade.

3

January 13, 2010 by sandwichcontrol

I was interested to learn that the word sanguine means cheerfully optimistic, but sanguinary means involving or causing much bloodshed. The English language is ridiculous and fascinating. Drop a letter from one word meaning one thing and add three letters and you end up with a word that has an entirely different meaning. No wonder people have such trouble with learning the English language. Even people to whom it is their native tongue. For a little help on spelling and grammar, consulting The Oatmeal never hurts.

I finished How to Lose Friends and Alienate People on Sunday and last night I resumed reading True Grit by Charles Portis. For those of you who don’t remember, a few months ago I talked about a project that the local University is doing that involves trying to get the entire school, students and faculty alike, to read True Grit and do stuff with it. Presentations, public readings, discussion groups, stuff like that. Well, since I am taking the semester off this Spring, I decided that I should start reading it again to keep me ever so slightly involved with what’s going on at school. Not to mention, it’s short and reads really quickly and, as you probably have guessed, I get a real sense of accomplishment and satisfaction from finishing books. It makes me feel a little less like an illiterate bibliophile who keeps buying books that he never reads. Hopefully this semester off will allow me to knock a few dozen books off of the To-Read list and make the ever growing stacks of books shrink a little bit.

Rooster says "Reading Is Fun!".

Recently I have been doing a little post-Grismas/pre-Spring cleaning of my office and have made an acute observation about myself. Most of you know that I enjoy crafts of all shapes and sizes. I like to learn skills like bookmaking, or letterpress, or writing poetry. I find them all very cathartic. The problem with learning all of these crafts is that they require stuff and the observation that I made about myself is that I hoard paper and things made out of paper. Notebooks, scrapbooking paper, rice paper, card stock, books of paper samples. This could, in part, be the reason that I collect books. They are made of paper. I remember as a child saving Birthday cards. When I moved out of my parents’s house for the first time, I remember packing my stuff and throwing away close to 15 years worth of Grismas cards, Birthday cards, letters, and notes. The interesting thing is that I don’t have a problem throwing it away. Once I throw it in the trash, that’s that and I don’t need to keep it. That’s not the problem. The problem is that I can’t throw most of it away because I use it for certain crafts and as I cycle through my crafts certain papers are needed again and therefore I need to keep them around. You never know when the Origami bug is going to bite me and I’ll need to make a little paper butterfly. What I need to do is organize it in something other than the stacking system that I am using now. Piles of paper everywhere.

Well, I need to go proof my next article for the City Wire a few times before I go to my actual job. More soon. ~SC


3 comments »

  1. teachersis says:

    Don’t take up scrapbooking…it makes the paper illness worse.

  2. Paula says:

    Is there a cure for those of us who want to do lots of things and who tend to ‘collect’ things? And, anyway, the best people are pack-rats…………….

    Garden Mama

  3. Dave says:

    I’m usually very cheerfully optimistic when shedding blood. DO-nt forget about Cloud Atlas.

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